The apparent increase in marine biodiversity over the last 50 million to 100 million years is real and not just a false reading produced by the inconsistencies of the fossil record, says a team of paleontologists led by the University of Chicago’s David Jablonski. This finding, published in the May 16 issue of the journal Science, may help scientists place the future of global biodiversity in its proper context.

“If you want to understand what’s going to come in the future you need to understand the dynamics that led up to the biodiversity we see now,” said Jablonski, the William Kenan Jr. Professor in Geophysical Sciences and Chair of the Committee on Evolutionary Biology at Chicago.

By some measures, up to 50 percent of the increase in marine animal biodiversity during the last 50 million years can be attributed to what paleontologists call “the Pull of the Recent.” This is the idea, posed in 1979 by University of Chicago paleontologist David Raup, that the level of biodiversity is inflated in younger fossil deposits because sampling of the modern world is so much more complete than in the geologic past.

Harvard University paleontologist Richard Bambach lauded the Science study as a major step toward dispelling lingering doubts about the true extent of biodiversity during the Cenozoic Era, which began after the dinosaurs went extinct 65 million years ago and continues today.

“The apparent diversity increase in the Cenozoic is not an artifact of the Pull of the Recent,” Bambach said. “I think that is very exciting.”

Bambach and others have said for years that diversity proliferated dramatically from the Paleozoic Era, which ended 250 million years ago, to the late present day. Bambach’s research indicated a doubling or tripling. The work of James Valentine of the University of California, Berkeley, and a co-author of the Science article, pointed to a 10-fold increase.

Joining Jablonski and Valentine on the project were Kaustuv Roy, University of California, San Diego, and University of Chicago graduate students Rebecca Price and Philip Anderson. Their study was supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation.

The team studied bivalves (clams, scallops, oysters and mussels) to address the issue because they are one of the major contributors to marine animal biodiversity. In order to screen out a potential false reading for Cenozoic biodiversity, the team inventoried bivalve diversity in the youngest part of the geologic record. This would allow them to assess the impact of the living bivalves by ignoring the biodiversity in modern oceans and building a diversity history based only on the fossil occurrences.

“This involved churning through a massive amount of the published paleontological literature of marine bivalves that lived during the last five million years,” Jablonski said.

Complicating the task were the nomenclature changes that affected some types of bivalves. A single species might have been classified differently in each of four different papers published during the last 100 years as paleontologists’ understanding of its evolutionary relationships improved, Jablonski said. Once the team members had standardized the classifications, they found that 906 of the 958 types (95 percent) of living bivalves they examined left a fossil record within the last five million years, as well as earlier in many cases.

The possibility still existed that rocks deposited five million years ago were unusually rich and that they were distorting the fossil record. So the team conducted a second inventory of bivalves that plunged much deeper into the fossil record, back 65 million years ago to the days of the dinosaurs. The paleontologists still were able to recover 87 percent of the types of bivalves that lived through that interval, when some thought the record might be poorer. The high recovery rate supports claims that the lower diversity levels observed from this time are genuine and not artificially depressed by sampling or preservation.

“Skeptics would say, well, that’s just bivalves. Maybe they’re somehow unique,” Jablonski said. But a similar recovery figure, 89 percent, applies to sea urchins, which researchers at London’s Natural History Museum inventoried for the same period.

There is plenty of work left to do.

“We’ve been talking about putting together a consortium of people to do exactly this kind of study with essentially all the major groups that make up the biodiversity increase,” Jablonski said. “It’d be a real boon for the field if we can get this under way, because it will simultaneously tackle the sampling question and put a huge chunk of the fossil record into a standardized evolutionary framework.”